1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an integrated drug management system and a method of providing a prescription drug by using the same, in which a plurality of individual drugs can be managed by using pattern information based on images, and the defect of a prescription drug can be determined by comparing prescription information of the prescription drug with pattern information of the prescription drug.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, as various kinds of drugs are mass-produced, systems for integratedly managing drug information have been required in a large-scale pharmacy and a pharmacy belonging to a hospital to manage many kinds of drugs.
However, codes for managing the drugs may vary depending on hospitals, pharmacies or countries employing the drugs, and a standard to search for the drugs is not properly provided. Accordingly, the effective management of drug information may be difficult.
When handling individual drugs in order to make up a prescription, although the individual drugs have unique external appearance such as a color, a shape, a size, a thickness, and a symbol mark, there are many drugs having similar external appearance, so it may be difficult to distinguish the individual drugs from each other by naked eyes of a user or to search for the information of the individual drug.
In general, prescription drugs prepared in a hospital or a pharmacy are individually packaged in the unit of a dose and the packaged prescription drugs are provided to patients on the basis of the duration and frequency for taking the prescription drugs. Since the prescription drugs are sealed in an individual pack after the preparation of the prescription drugs has been finished, it is difficult to determine if the prescription drugs exactly match with prescription information.
In order to solve the above problem, a drug packing paper is made of a transparent material, so that drugs sealed by the packing paper can be easily recognized from the outside.
However, a hospital or a pharmacy, which manages a great amount of prescription drugs, requires great labor force and long inspection time in order to determine the normal preparation state of individually packaged drugs.
In addition, since errors caused due to drugs having the same color or size, or drugs having similar colors or sizes cannot be easily checked, the prescription drugs may be defective. The defective prescription drugs not only degrade the healing effect for patients, but cause fatal injury to the patients.